One of the more nerve-wracking scenes in film this year consists of a man sitting alone at a desk. Through his augmented reality glasses (more on that in a bit) he’s volleying three IM conversations, watching the latest cut of a past-deadline television commercial and “uh-huh”-ing his way though a video conference with an artiste in need of mollycoddling.

With just a few fingertip flicks and nods of the chin David (Benjamin Dickinson, also the director and co-writer) struggles vainly against modernity’s quicksand. With sleek (mostly) black and white cinematography, an unpredictable editing style, unexpected musical choices (Handel, Vivaldi and Bach) and dialogue that is droll af, the Creative Control is the bleeding-edge tech drama we hoped Steve Jobs would be. It’s always the start-ups that surprise us.

David is a jaded 21st century creative, popping pills as he walk-and-talks among the translucent cubes of his advertising firm. He carries with him enough gloom that you take it on faith that inside, somewhere, lurks an artistic (or at least human) soul. It’s a little bit in the future, which means the hairstyles are a smidge unusual and somehow they’ve figured out a way to make text messages blip out with the speed of telepathy. A new product, Augmenta, is about to launch, and David’s pitch is to let a bonafide genius fiddle with it and return whatever he comes up with as a marketing strategy. That figure is Reggie Watts, playing a version of himself exaggerated with a touch of Kanye West, and it lands the client.

“We might have a new art form on our hands!” one yes man shouts about the hyper-functional virtual reality glasses. In actuality, it’s just another addictive distraction that’ll immediately be used for masturbation and, as David soon learns, will further separate people from reality.

David’s girlfriend Juliette (Nora Zehetner) is a part-time yoga instructor, and the pair live in a modern New York City apartment with enormous windows. We’ll later learn she quit her own fast-paced job out of a vague sense of rebellion against The System, but still mutters “fucking hippies” under her breath when she goes to teach classes at a farmhouse upstate.

Dickinson rolls the dice on being that most criminal of things in 2016 – problematic – and comes out intact

David’s best chum is Wim (Dan Gill), a fashion photographer with a uncaged id who likes to taunt David with snaps of all the models he’s screwing. Wim also has a girlfriend, Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), who David either covets or pities or maybe both. Sophie is an out-of-work designer, so David gets her a gig working on costumes for his horrific television commercials – such as one for the first panic attack drug in vape-able form. Use of the Augmenta glasses convinces David that he is madly in love with her.

Dickinson’s camera trawls the hipster haunts of New York, from cocaine ragers to art openings, balancing the bright hospital-like emptiness of a futuristic office (all computer terminals are clear parallelograms of plexiglass) with the Dionysian darkness of Watts’s dinner setting. Dickinson’s David roams through it, both above it all but part of its matrix. The allure/repulsion of the lifestyle out in the open for everyone; self-loathing just another addiction. If the Robert Altman of California Split could upload to a shared server it would download as something like this.

There may be some who criticize Creative Control for being about yet another woe-is-me white boy weighed down with make believe problems. They wouldn’t be wrong. This is another successful man who only wants the woman he’s constructed in his head. One could further argue that Juliette’s self-discovery through tantric sex is played for condescending laughs.

But here’s the thing: Dickinson rolls the dice on being that most criminal of things in 2016 – problematic – and comes out the other end intact. He frequently plays for laughs, but he’s ultimately very sincere. When something is this engaging (and funny, did I mention funny?) it ceases to merely be about ideas and becomes, even in this borderline sci-fi context, a thoughtful movie about people. We might have a new artist on our hands here.